Overview of Course

Our voyage aboard the MV World Odyssey presents an amazing opportunity to explore a wide variety of tropical, subtropical, and temperate coastal habitats and ecosystems including coral reefs, sandy beaches, seagrass meadows, mangrove forests and estuarine habitats, kelp beds, and rocky intertidal shorelines, all of which support a high diversity of marine life. These coastal habitats and ecosystems also provide a variety of ecosystem services including protection from storms and erosion, carbon sequestration, fisheries and food production, as well as recreation and tourism. Because of the economic benefits realized from access to ocean navigation, coastal fisheries, and tourism and recreation, human settlements are often more concentrated in the coastal zone, with about 40% of the world’s population presently living within 100 km of the coast. As population density and economic activity in the coastal zone increase, pressures on coastal ecosystems also increase, resulting in habitat degradation and destruction, increased chemical and nutrient pollution, and a loss of biodiversity. Using our ship as a research platform to observe coastal habitats from nearshore waters along with time ashore to visit these habitats and document the ecosystem services they provide to local populations, students will emerge from this course with a greater understanding of the potential these habitats provide and perils they face in the 21st century.